Nikon D800 Night Time Lapse Tutorial

I got the Nikon D800 and the Canon 5D Mark III in for review. To play around with the low light performance I thought I would have fun do to a time lapse with the D800, and shoot the garage scenes with the Canon 5D Mark III.

I set the D800 on a tripod in the backseat of our mini van and use shock cords to tie it down.

I used an ISO 100, 3.2 f-stop and .4 second shutter speed and I focused way out in front of the car.

Going in to the menu system on the Nikon I went to the ‘Shooting Menu’ -> ‘Interval Timer Shooting’.

I then picked one second between shots for my interval. The manual shows 1 minute, but I put a 0 there.

I then went to ‘start’ on and pressed the OK button.

Before I started driving I wanted to see if the buffer in the camera could handle it on RAW, but after 10 exposures the camera slowed to a halt and couldn’t handle the over 70meg files I was sending its way. So I used the smallest jpg size and since that was still bigger in resolution to the 1080p video I was still in good shape.

Many ways to do this but one of my favorite is to use After Effects to process the images. Since I couldn’t shoot RAW I decided to skip the step of bring them in to Lightroom first.

After Effects Procedure

Open After Effects, and double click on the upper left pane on Project Tab.

Find the time lapse folder and select the first image the JPEG sequence should be checked already, click Open

Right click on the new sequence -> Interpret Footage -> Main check for 24fps

Very good post and the Time Lapse is gorgeous! Can you tell me the next steps of your rendering. I suppose that you save it .avi compression and after that (editing in Premiere Pro) you saved H.264 which type? quality JPEG?

I have the 5D2 but only use premieres essential 10 so had trouble with scaling in.
By coincidence I bought the canon s100 for the gps function. Interestingly though I have used the S100 for time laps and instead of scaling in later , I change in camera the still image aspect ratio to 16:9 giving you 9m 4000X 2248

Hi, Dave. Love your site. I am new to photography and DSLR video but I have been interested in learning for a while now. Your site is helping me a great deal and is an inspiration. I have saved up and was finally able to purchase my first camera, a canon 60D. I have already installed magic lantern as well.

Would you recommend the same camera settings for my camera? What would you recommend I set my aperture and shutter speed at for a night drive time lapse? Do you think a 50mm 1.8 lens would also suffice to recreate a video like this? Granted I know it won’t look as good.

Sorry for all of the questions.
Thanks for your time and keep up the great work!

@Andrew – Your canon ranges from 30 seconds to 1/4000th of a second, not 1/30th. when the camera says 30” – that is 30 seconds… if it says 4”, it’s 4 seconds, when it says 4 it’s a 4th, and 40 is a 40th….